Like many government reports the authors seem to get paid by the pound and the way things are said is even more important than what is said. Finally there is the way the report is presented to the public.
First lets take a look at the press release for the report.
Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
The report is based on scientific evidence that a warming world will be accompanied by changes in the intensity, duration, frequency, and geographic extent of weather and climate extremes
* Abnormally hot days and nights, along with heat waves, are very likely to become more common. Cold nights are very likely to become less common.
* Sea ice extent is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in the Arctic Ocean in summer in coming decades.
* Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense.
* Droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe in some regions.
* Hurricanes will likely have increased precipitation and wind.
* The strongest cold-season storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are likely to produce stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.
This is pretty grim. I mean I am tempted to get really worried and call my congressman and demand something be done about it. Dag nabbit they can send a man to the moon (Or used to be able to) why can't they control the weather?.
Well when you dig into the report something else emerges.
Droughts
Averaged over the continental U.S. and southern Canada the most severe droughts occurred in the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall trend in the observational record, which dates back to 1895.
70 years of warming and we are still trying to beat the dustbowl.
Floods
Lins and Slack (1999, 2005) reported no significant changes in high flow above the 90th percentile. On the other hand, Groisman et al. (2001) showed that for the same gauges, period, and territory, there were statistically significant regional average increases in the uppermost fractions of total streamflow. However, these trends became statistically insignificant after Groisman et al. (2004) updated the analysis to include the years 2000 through 2003, all of which happened to be dry years over most of the eastern United States.
Statistically insignificant, its a good phrase. Why didn't it make it into the press release ??
Storms
Hurricanes:
The final example is a time series of U.S. landfalling hurricanes for 1851-2006 . . . A linear trend was fitted to the full series and also for the following subseries: 1861-2006, 1871-2006, and so on up to 1921-2006. As in preceding examples, the model fitted was ARMA (p,q) with linear trend, with p and q identified by AIC.
For 1871-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00229, standard error .00089, significant at p=.01. For 1881-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00212, standard error .00100, significant at p=.03. For all other cases, the estimated trend was negative, but not statistically significant.
Seems Hurricanes have been declining
Tornadoes:
There is no evidence for a change in the severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, and the large changes in the overall number of reports make it impossible to detect if meteorological changes have occurred.
Bout the same as always in other words.
HEAT WHAT ABOUT HOT AND COLD THAT IS WHAT MATTERS ???
Analysis of multi-day very extreme heat and cold episodes in the United States were updated from Kunkel et al. (1999a) for the period 1895-2005. The most notable feature of the pattern of the annual number of extreme heat waves (Figure 2.3a) through time is the high frequency in the 1930s compared to the rest of the years in the 1895-2005 period. This was followed by a decrease to a minimum in the 1960s and 1970s and then an increasing trend since then. There is no trend over the entire period, but a highly statistically significant upward trend since 1960. . . Cold waves show a decline in the first half of the 20th century, then a large spike of events during the mid-1980s, then a decline. The last 10 years have seen a lower number of severe cold waves in the United States than in any other 10-year period since record-keeping began in 1895 . . .
1930s still the hottest. No change in cold. According to the AGW models isn't cold days and extremes of cold supposed to be most affected by CO2 ??
You have to ask how does a report that finds no increase in storms, drought, flood, heatwaves, or coldwaves, no increase in climate related disasters come to the conclusion that we are about to get a whole bunch of them ?? Well it doesn't the press release does. I had to dig through the report to find what was really going on.
The only real conclusion the report reaches is that Droughts,Floods, Storms, etc are more damaging currently than they have been in the past. This is something that could have been predicted without any change in climate. There are more people than there have ever been. Our property is more valuable than it has ever been. We enjoy living near the water at levels completely out of bounds with common sense. So yes any disaster will be more damaging.
Take the claims of the AGW people with a grain of salt. According to them it has been going on for 250 years and as it relates to you, It has done nothing.
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